Posts Tagged ‘Tells’

Lil Wayne is back and more honest than ever on his long-awaited new album, Tha Carter V, which dropped on Friday (September 28), the day after the rapper’s 36th birthday.

After listening to 22 tracks spanning over 80 minutes, fans arrive at the album’s outro, “Let It All Work Out,” which finds Wayne opening up about the time he sustained a self-inflicted gunshot wound when he was just 12 years old. In the past, he’s claimed that the shooting was merely an accident, but his verse on Solange’s 2016 track “Mad” sparkled speculation that it was actually a suicide attempt. On that song, he rapped, “And when I attempted suicide, I didn’t die / I remember how mad I was on that day / Man, you gotta let it go before it get up in the way.”

Wayne confirms the speculation toward the end of “Let It All Work Out” — which samples Sampha’s “Indecision” — by detailing what happened during the shooting: “I aimed where my heart was pounding / I shot it, and I woke up with blood all around me / It’s mine, I didn’t die, but as I was dying / God came to my side and we talked about it / He sold me another life and he made a prophet.”

Wayne’s mother, Jacida Carter, also addressed her son’s suicide attempt on Tha Carter V‘s penultimate track, “Used 2.” In a spoken outro, she said, “I still don’t know today. Was he playing with the gun or was it an accident? I be wanting to ask him but I never asked him after all these years. … I never really found out about what really happened with him and that shooting.”

According to a recent Billboard cover story, Wayne shot himself in the chest at age 12 after his mother forbade him from rapping. In the same interview, Young Money president Mack Maine explained Wayne’s decision to finally tell the full story of what happened that day. “He just told me one day that he was ready to address it now,” Maine said. “Just being an adult, reaching a level of maturity and comfort where it’s like, ‘I want to talk about this because I know a lot of people out here might be going through that.’”

Right before he launches into a relentless, spacious flow on his airy song “2012,” Chicago rapper Joey Purp acknowledges his producer. “Yo Knox,” he quickly slurs over a chiming sample, shouting out trusted collaborator Knox Fortune. To hear the 26-year-old producer and musician tell the story of how they assembled the tune, that brief salutation represented the energy the two captured in the room together.

“We were just sitting around. I think I started to play the sample-sounding thing, and from there, [Joey] just started rapping, maybe with no drums even,” Knox recently told MTV News over the phone, minutes after stepping off a plane in New York. “It just built really organically. It was nice because it was something we really didn’t have to think about at all.”

The proverbial sausage often gets made via much messier (and sometimes much sexier) methods. But when it’s among two musicians who’ve worked alongside each other for years, sometimes it really is that simple.

Knox and Joey first met through Vic Mensa and quickly began collaborating on Joey’s Leather Corduroys project with KAMI. In 2016, Joey got a boost from his impressive iiiDrops mixtape, executive produced by Knox, which included the infectious Chance the Rapper-aided “Girls @.” Joey returned the favor, helming Knox’s debut, Paradise, in 2017.

It only made sense, then, that Knox would have a hand in Joey’s proper debut, QUARTERTHING, which dropped on September 7. He worked with Joey on three songs — “2012,” “Aw Sh*t!,” and “QUARTERTHING” — building on sessions the duo had stashed away from recordings in Los Angeles and London. “I’d arrange them by most to least interesting, and then put them in potential places that they can work,” Knox said. “And if it doesn’t work, [we] just immediately removed it and just stuck to a set guideline of, ‘Do we like this? No, we don’t like this. OK, it’s gone.’ And then we never think about it again.”

That’s why, in listening to Knox tell stories of creating these songs with help from the Social Experiment’s Peter Cottontale, Nate Fox, and Nico Segal, who executive produced QUARTERTHING, it almost sounds accidental; as if they randomly stumbled upon great moments. But it’s not quite that, he said. It’s more like following a formula that definitely wouldn’t work for everyone but nearly always works for them.

“A lot of artists you work with, you’ll have a four-hour session with them, and they spend all four hours working on a song, trying to get it finished up,” Knox said. “Joey will sit and play [NBA]2K and listen to shit I’m making or just playing in the room for three and a half of those hours, and then in 30 minutes write the best verse you’ve ever heard.”

It’s easy to visualize this from one full listen through QUARTERTHING. Joey seems to morph with the music on each track, entering exultant and victorious on the album’s opening bars like a wrestler stomping down an entrance ramp. By the time the house-indebted “Elastic” hits, he’s gone icy to match the clubby vibes before dialing the charm back up to shout out Mike Jones a few songs later.

Of course, it pays to be prepared for these moments. Knox’s attention to detail is pristine, and he admitted that he’s “usually very in control” of his contributions. He added the sounds of shaken-up spray cans to “QUARTERTHING” along with selections from “Rick Rubin’s personal modular synthesizer.” To coalesce all these elements into a beat is tricky, especially when you’re creating music someone else has to meld with. That’s where Peter, Nate, and Nico come in — sprinkling a “Pop Goes the Weasel” soundbite at the end of “Aw Sh*t!” and recruiting DJ Taye’s low synth rumbles to finish it off.

As much as he likes being in the driver’s seat, Knox called it “super, super reassuring” to have the trio, plus Joey, as closers for QUARTERTHING: “It’s very nice to be able to take something where you’re kind of at a dead end with it and be like, ‘What do you guys think of it?’ Cause they’ll always have something for you.”

With projects from peers like Noname and Very Slight, as well as his own handiwork, out in the world — not to mention some new Knox Fortune originals potentially ready to drop as early as October — Knox feels like it’s Chicago season once again, a sentiment he amplified on Twitter. “It feels like one of those moments again of something special in Chicago, and that’s completely what it’s all about for me,” he said. “That’s why I enjoy doing it.”

1974′s iconic Rumble in the Jungle boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman is one of the sport’s all-time bouts. Before the pair squared off for eight rounds (ending with Ali toppling Foreman), local spectators in the crowd chanted their support for Ali, the underdog, in their native Lingala, “Ali Bomaye!” — translation: “Ali, kill him!”

This rallying cry has since become a go-to mantra in hip-hop, including for The Game in 2012, and now for South Carolina up-and-comer Nick Grant — the MTV PUSH artist for the month of September.

As he told MTV recently, he first encountered the phrase while watching Will Smith’s portrayal of the legendary boxer in 2001′s Ali. So he updated it with his own name for a song he called “Nicky Bomaye.”

“I just took that based on my position of the game and how I want to compete and contribute and always just want to be the best,” Grant told MTV. “Because that’s what hip-hop was based on from the start.”

He continued the boxing theme by calling DJ Khaled, whose trademark motivational maxims feature on the studio version of the track, the Mickey and/or Apollo Creed to his Rocky. “He’s encouraging me and talking me through it because in this time, I’m one of the guys that’s pushing that heavy and trying to put it back into the culture where people start to respect it again,” he said.

Watch Grant break down the meaning behind the song above. Then watch his full performance of “Nicky Boyame” below.